Diablo 3 - Preview and Q&A

The recently announced Eastern fighter is like nothing seen in previous Diablo games. For the sake of Blizzard canon, the Monk from Diablo's Hellfire expansion must have been geriatric. He came to Tristram to live out his years in peace, but was forced out of his holy Lazyboy to get the demons of Hell off of his lawn, gosh darnit.
The difference between the old and new Monks is like that of Obi-Wan and Ewan McGreggor. Things on the screen are dead before you hear the sound of the click. The Seven Strikes ability, which sees the Monk zipping across the screen to hit several surrounding enemies at once, is a good example of how Street Fighter-zany it feels. It's an absurdly kinetic class--moreso than Diablo II's Assassin--and makes for a nice addition to the cast. But then America always prefers a younger face.

How is the length of the game and replayability compared to D2?Randomized monsters, environments, events, items, etc. Biggest issues of D2, path of least resistance to the best items was a very short one. In D3 those issues will be resolved, Magic find will be less important in D3 so that replayability wont just be based on stacking magic find and going on mephisto runs constantly… spreading content out equally, praises WoW quest system in that it gets you to do more than grind one monster forever, working on systems that will remove the repetitiveness.Big fan of story and lore of Diablo Lore, love the books, necromancer is the most fleshed out faction in Diablo world, not going to get that class again, but will the faction still be active in the new game?Just because you wont see a certain class as a playable character in the game, doesnít mean that they wont exist as NPC's, cant give anything away because they donít know for sure what will or wont be in the final game, and there is a necromancer in the floor demo.

Well *I* for one, loved mephruns : P
(This coming from someone who only got one (1) good artifact from countless mephruns)

we would very much like the currency to be much more meaningful, and want players to be able to use gold as currency as opposed to stone of Jordan for instance, looking into it

I rather thought that gold having very little worth in D2 was refreshing, interesting, and good. You could buy a hundred potions and scrolls without thinking twice about it, so it didn't interfere with actual gameplay, and players would trade items for items. The community would come up with the currency themselves - perfect skulls, later Stone of Jordans…

Originally Posted by Acleacius
So if I read this right, we will have gender forced on us based on our class, again, 12 years later, really, no really? These people are actually paid money to think, astonishing.

You read it wrong - D3 allows you to choose the gender of the character you're playing.

Originally Posted by Krzychu
I rather thought that gold having very little worth in D2 was refreshing, interesting, and good. You could buy a hundred potions and scrolls without thinking twice about it, so it didn't interfere with actual gameplay, and players would trade items for items. The community would come up with the currency themselves - perfect skulls, later Stone of Jordans…

I emphatically disagree. SoJs became currency only through mass (and I mean MASS) duping, and high runes are used the same way and through the same duping. The best legitimate currency nowadays is Forum Gold from an external site (D2JSP). Trading items for items is extremely tedious, just like bartering is in the real world, and so is trading for anything in game through the extremely ungainly mechanism of making games with trade titles and hoping by luck the right person joins. Contrast that kind of trading with an Auction House (as in WoW), or with D2JSP, where you put up the items you find and they sell for currency to whomever wants to pay the most, and then you can take that currency and find exactly what you want.

There's just no point to having a currency if it's not worth something. Having a thriving 3rd party site to handle your trading means your game is doing something wrong. Diablo III's trade system will be more of a success the closer sites like D2JSP are to useless for the new game.

I think I see your point, but still, I enjoyed the D2 system most of the time.
I mean,

Originally Posted by Yeesh
and so is trading for anything in game through the extremely ungainly mechanism of making games with trade titles and hoping by luck the right person joins.

- I never had any problems with that, for example. It never took too long to get what I wanted after announcing my offer on an appriopriate channel.

As for duplicates… well, I seem to remember that during my time duping was possible only for a brief period before it was fixed; after that, cases of duping, uh, seemed to be rare. Maybe I don't remember it that well, though.

Still, if they want gold to be of some value now, that's fine by me, so long as they don't overdo it and turn it to grindfest or something. Cheap consumables are a necessity, too.